Here Goes Reyes

This morning, I saw this phrase in the giant news crawl in Times Square: “Former Mets SS Jose Reyes.” That “former” was painful. Last May, I was taken to a Mets game for Mother’s Day—that’s been my present for a few years now, and I like it. I like the pink bats, the spring air in Queens, the big blue 42 in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, and baseball generally. I even like the Citi Field KissCam (the theme music for that is “I Got You Babe”). I don’t like watching the Mets lose, but this past year, at least, whatever I hoped, I didn’t really expect the result to be different—the team was already struggling. The best thing you could say about David Wright’s performance was that he got on base twice with walks. The Mets were losing 4-1 in the ninth inning. I was still having a pretty great Mother’s Day.

Then Reyes came up to bat, with one out and Daniel Murphy on first, and smacked the ball to center field. Maybe with another batter it would have been a double, but there was no doubt that Reyes would get to third—he reels around the bases, the pink armbands a blur—and that the runner ahead of him would get home. “No hesitation from Murphy, better hurry up, because here comes Reyes,” Keith Hernandez, the Mets broadcaster said. Reyes made other players better. But he couldn’t make his team’s owners, the Wilpon family, any better, or make the legal and financial morass left behind by their long entanglement with Bernard Madoff. (Jeffrey Toobin has the whole sad story.)

The team has made plenty of other mistakes, but, as the Times’ George Vecsey wrote, “it is intellectually dishonest to suggest that the incarcerated Uncle Bernie has nothing to do with all this failure and loss. Madoff robbed the guts and heart of a franchise.” (“The Mets are not building. The Mets are hunkering down,” he added.) Years ago, the Wilpons, in effect, chose Bernie over Jose. With Reyes’s contract up, they reportedly didn’t even make an offer to keep him—a player who grew up in their farm system, and just won the National League batting title. The Marlins will have him for the next several years.

The team the Mets were playing last Mother’s Day was, as it happens, the Dodgers, who have also had a rough year, management-wise—arguably a worse, or at least a more sordid one than the Mets; its collapse involved a truly ugly divorce. And Mets fans are not the ones the Madoffs hurt the most—there have been lost life savings, and suicides. But it is remarkable that this is the year, as Reeves Wiedeman noted recently in a post about the end of the N.B.A. lockout—and it could have been said just as easily about the N.F.L. lockout—sports fans have had to become business-page readers. And, on balance, it hasn’t been the players who came out looking the worst.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.